Topic: Member data error message when posting

[melanie1986]

 This is a new one for me and I've run out of ideas as to what is causing it.
 
 One of my members when she tries to post in some areas gets this message.

 

 She has tried different browsers and even from her phone. The weirdest thing is that she can post in one section, but not another. I've checked the same using a different browser and I didn't have any issues, nor do any of my other members.

[melanie1986]

 Second post. We have found the issue but it doesn't resolve her problem. Normally when writing long posts, most of us on my board write it in word first then copy/paste. This problem is only occurring when she tries to paste, otherwise she can post normally. Has anyone had this issue before?

[YogiBear]

Is your member copying and pasting from a Word document in which case...

http://wiki.simplemachines.org/smf/Why_do_I_have_partially_blank_or_missing_text_in_posts

Or rather...

https://www.simplemachines.org/community/index.php?topic=319726.msg2124919;topicseen#msg2124919

[Kindred]

1- don't use Word.... lol

2- switch your system to UTF-8

[Arantor]

You could be less smug about the choices other people make - writing in Word and posting to SMF is sufficiently common, Word’s eccentricities have been helped in 2.1.

[Kindred]

not being smug.... just posting from a phone, so being brief.

Yes, I know word posting is common... hence the laugh after the suggestion - because it was tongue in cheek.

and yes...  the requirement to use UTF8, amongst other things means that 2.1 fixes most of the problems.

[Arantor]

2.1 fixed the problem before it went UTF-8 only though... but even so, there was no need to suggest dropping Word as though people are doing it wrong.

[melanie1986]

 The problem only showed up yesterday for the first time, this member has been doing it this way for years. I think that maybe there might be a clue in this; yesterday afternoon I went edit a very long post and I got an error saying :

 It appears that your database may require an upgrade. Your forum's files are currently at version SMF 2.0.15, while your database is at version 2.0.14. The above error might possibly go away if you execute the latest version of upgrade.php.

 How do I make that change?

[Arantor]

That error message is erroneous; it means you had a database error for some reason (maybe in the log?) and because you've installed it at one version and upgraded since with the package manager, it's convinced (wrongly) that something else is wrong.

You don't need to go 'upgrading' anything at this point, it won't make that error go away, it'll just stop telling you that you need an upgrade.

[melanie1986]

 One of our members got the same error when posting about an hour ago. It was a long post. He eventually was able to post by splitting it in two? So obviously there is some issue maybe with something?

[Arantor]

Yeah, it may be that the post is too big for what's configured in the settings... out of interest, what *is* configured for maximum post length? It's in the forum > post settings area, if I remember rightly.

[melanie1986]

 We've set it at the default: O for no maximum. This is the weirdest thing ever as we're not doing anything we don't normally do and Vadim's post was mediocre in length. I posted last Tuesday that had twice the word count he attempted to post this morning.

[Arantor]

OK, so 'no maximum' doesn't entirely mean 'no maximum'. It means SMF doesn't check the length, and it's possible that you're running into some of the internal not-obvious limits of the database underneath.

As mentioned if you haven't already converted to UTF-8, you should take a backup and then do that... once that's done, you should also change the maximum to 70000 and then back to 0. This will force the table to get bigger under the hood so it won't cut off (or error out) if you try to put too much content in there.